Sunday, July 24, 2016

"When adapting, the fundamentals you are left with are the words and gestures and actions and interactions of characters."

How does one reconcile the ideas of artistry in cinema, the kind of magic of cinephilia that we see each time we look up at the screen, with the business practices that often painted as limiting it? James Schamus has somehow made a career of toeing this (likely constructed) dichotomy, helping produce some of the early independent films of the 1990s before becoming the co-founder of Focus Features, which made films like The Pianist, Atonement, Brokeback Mountain, and Moonrise Kingdom, as well as a collaborator of Ang Lee, writing the screenplays for The Ice Storm, Ride With The Devil, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. James discusses this work between the politics of making art for specialty audiences, as well as his interest in the very nature of art through his work as a theorist and professor at Columbia University. They then turn to his directorial debut, an adaptation of Philip Roth's Indignation, and what it means to modulate performance. Finally, the two discuss Budd Boetticher's 1957 hostage western The Tall T, and what a specialty art house producer can learn from watching Randolph Scott contemplate existence in this low budget western.

0:00-3:57 Opening5:08-17:11 Establishing Shots — 4 Years of The Cinephiliacs

Sunday, July 10, 2016

Abbas Kiarostami, born in 1940 in Tehran, turned to
filmmaking in 1970 when he helped set up the Institute for Intellectual
Development of Children and Young Adults. He had made a half dozen shorts and
one feature, The Report in 1977,
before the Iranian Revolution changed the public face of his country. While
many filmmakers moved away in search of more creative freedom, Kiarostami continued to direct. Around the early 1990s, his films suddenly
found an international foothold at festivals via the Koker trilogy and his most
famous work, Close-Up. In 1997, he
won a Palm D’Or for Taste of Cherry,
helping paint the way for Iranian filmmakers to find an audience abroad. His
filmmaking only became more cryptic and complex, especially with his early
adoption of digital cinema with Ten
and the self-reflexive documentary, Ten
on Ten. His final films, Certified
Copy and Like Someone In Love,
were his only made outside his native Iran. Kiarostami passed away on July 4, 2016. In this special episode of the podcast, Amir Soltani, Tina Hassania, and Carson Lund join the podcast to celebrate the life and work of one of the legendary filmmakers to emerge on the world cinema stage.

MUBI

About The Cinephiliacs

The Cinephiliacs is a podcast exploring the past and future of cinephelia. Film critic Peter Labuza has interviewed critics, programmers, academics, filmmakers, and more about their relationship to film and film culture. Additionally, each guest will bring in a particular favorite film and discuss it with Labuza. Indiewire declares, "If you want to hear film critics talk at length about their craft, there are few better places on the Internet" and Keyframe Daily has called it "Exhibit A" for the future of film culture